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Elixir

Get instant Grafana dashboards for Prometheus metrics with the Elixir PromEx library

I have been using Grafana for almost four years now, and in that time it has become my go-to tool for my application observability needs. Especially now that Grafana allows you to also view logs and traces, you can easily have all three pillars of observability surfaced through Grafana. As a result, when I started working on the Elixir PromEx library, having Grafana be the end target for the metrics dashboards made perfect sense.

AppSignal for Elixir Integration 2.1 Released

We’re happy to announce the release of AppSignal for Elixir 2.1.0. 🥳 In this version, we’ve made our error helpers more flexible than before. You could already send Elixir exceptions directly through AppSignal and now you can add extra metadata to errors when using send_error/2-4. Let’s go through all of the changes 😀

Announcing AppSignal for Elixir 2.0

In order to be the best 5-in-1 APM tool for Elixir, we’re constantly working on improving how AppSignal works and integrates with your app. With AppSignal by your side, you’ll have a clear overview of your app’s performance after an installation process that we keep fast and simple. As a first APM for Elixir out there, we’ve always focused on doing all the heavy lifting and providing Elixir developers with a service we’d love to use ourselves.

Capabilities of Elixir's Logger

Logs are an important part of your application and logging shouldn’t be one of the last things you think of. You should configure your log system, formatter, and style as soon as you start the development of your app. Also, do your best to document the process and share how it works with the rest of your team. In this article, we’re going to demonstrate how logs work in Elixir. We’ll jump into Elixir’s Logger module, which brings a lot of power to logging features.

The State of Elixir HTTP Clients

In today’s post, we’ll look at two Elixir HTTP client libraries: Mint and Finch. Finch is built on top of Mint. We’ll see the benefits offered by this abstraction layer. We’ll also talk about some of the existing HTTP client libraries in the ecosystem and discuss some of the things that make Mint and Finch different. Finally, we’ll put together a quick project that makes use of Finch to put all of our learning into action. Let’s jump right in!

Best Practices for Background Jobs in Elixir

Erlang & Elixir are ready for asynchronous work right off the bat. Generally speaking, background job systems aren’t needed as much as in other ecosystems but they still have their place for particular use cases. This post goes through a few best practices I often try to think of in advance when writing background jobs, so that I don’t hit some of the pain points that have hurt me multiple times in the past.

Elixir Package 1.13: Phoenix LiveView Helpers and Updated Typespecs

With a special thanks to Aleksandar and Unai, we’re happy to announce AppSignal for Elixir 1.13.0, which includes our all-new LiveView instrumentation helpers and updated typespecs. If you’re not an AppSignal user yet, make sure to check out the product tour and see how errors, performance, host metrics and triggers all come together in one tool.

Configuring your Elixir Application at Runtime with Vapor

Configuration has long been a hot topic in the Elixir community, and luckily, in the recent months, there has been a great deal of thoughtful work put into making this problem an easier one to solve. Today, we’re going to show you how to migrate from an Elixir application that has been configured with the widely used config/*.exs files at compile-time, to an application that instead uses environment variables for configuration and is configured at runtime.

Elixir GenServers: Overview and Tutorial

Elixir describes itself as "a dynamic, functional programming language designed for building scalable and maintainable applications." Although it's a relative newcomer, Elixir is built on top of the functional programming language Erlang. Elixir is capable of using any Erlang library, and is ideal for use cases such as web development and distributed and low-latency systems. The power, dynamism, and feature-rich toolset of Elixir have made it somewhat of a "cult classic" among programmers.